These remarks are the public presentation portion of PhD defence. I remain thankful to my friends and colleagues for attending--they offered a crucial intervention, converting my anxiety adrenaline into performance adrenaline, or at least that's how it felt.Before
I begin, there are many people I would like to thank. Today, I will restrict
myself to those who helped directly with the writing of this presentation and
those present here today, and leave the rest for the Acknowledgements of my
dissertation itself. Thank you to Alexandra Carruthers, Marija Cetinic, Jeff
Diamanti, and Katie Lewandowski for helping me as I prepared this talk. Thank
you to Dr. Janice Williamson, our fearless chair, to Dr. Priscilla Wald, Dr. Natalie
Loveless, Dr. Mike O’Driscoll, Dr. Mark Simpson, and Dr. Imre Szeman for taking
the time to read my work—I eagerly look forward to our conversation. Thank you also
to those of you here to listen today. I hope you find it lives up to your
expectations. The title for my talk this morning is:

The
Contested Politics of the U.S. Post-Apocalyptic Novel

It seems humorous
to me now that I decided against studying stories that centered on the
apocalypse itself. I could not commit myself to researching such a
sensationalist genre where implausibly everyone seemed to survive. How was I to
know that implausible survival would be precisely what I could come to expect
from the U.S. post-apocalyptic novel as well? For instance, take an opening
paragraph of a recent novel:

“On the map, their destination
had been a stretch of green, as if they would be living on the golf course. No
freeways nearby, or any roads, really: those had been left to rot years before.
Frida had given this place a secret name, the afterlife, and on their journey,
when they were forced to hide in abandoned rest stops, or when they’d filled
the car with the last of their gasoline, this place had beckoned. In her mind
it was a township, and Cal was the mayor. She was the mayor’s wife” (Lepucki
2014, 3).

This
is how the narrator of Edan Lepucki’s California
(2014) begins the novel. It contains in miniature instructions for the
post-apocalyptic plot: after catastrophe look towards a new Edenic beginning,
document destruction, struggle with adversity, leave things behind, and, at the
end, re-form the social. Compare it with how Hig, the narrator of Peter
Heller’s The Dog Stars (2012), begins
to recount his story:

“I
keep the Beast running, I keep the 100 low lead on tap, I foresee attacks. I am
young enough, I am old enough. I used to love to fish for trout more than
anything” (Heller 2012, 3).

The
first striking point of comparison is the gruffness and closeness of Heller’s
first person to the distanced knowledge of Lepuki’s third. Curiously, too, this
difference deepens when we notice that Lepuki’s narrator describes a couple, and,
though Hig mentions his late wife on the first page, Heller’s is a confident solo
pilot. Each character anticipates their future as much as they look back on
their past. They express a relationship to fuel and are fixated on survival. California and The Dog Stars are examples of U.S. post-apocalyptic novels that fit
into the literary fiction end of the form’s literary-popular spectrum. These two novels stand at one coordinate of what I
am calling the contested politics of the post-apocalyptic novel.

Popular
U.S. post-apocalyptic novels have tended to include blight and toxicity as
elements of their story worlds. There are stark examples, the gory death of anyone
who feels that tickle of the Captain Trips disease in their throat in Stephen
King’s The Stand (1978) or, looking
back further, the barren deserts and anti-intellectual climate of Walter Miller
Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1964).
Devastated story worlds are not only the stuff of the popular side of things.
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006)
banishes any colour but ash grey from its landscapes. We find a different kind
of devastation in Steven Amsterdam’s Things
We Didn’t See Coming (2009) as the narrator muses on his colleague Julia’s
vision of the future.

She
says her goal “is to connect the coasts and the north-south borders with great
corridors of wild land—farms, forests, suburbs reclaimed by nature. One day
there will be no more cities—their shells will be ghostly interruptions of the
new nation, which will be composed of rural communities linked in all directions.
Even if we aren’t here, the land will be:
My money will keep it safe. When the rain comes back—ever the optimist—this
is where her utopia will be” (Amsterdam 2009, 125).

Amsterdam’s
narrator relays Julia’s plan for the future despite the signal that their part
of the world has been plagued by drought. In this way Amsterdam’s novel takes a
step away from the blasted setting of the popular variants of post-apocalyptic
novels. Cast between the craggy-rock worlds of earlier novels and the green
hope of novels like Lepucki’s and Heller’s, Thing
We Didn’t See Coming offers a tantalizing read precisely because it does
not offer a revelation of what disaster has taken place. In each of its nine
vignettes, there are hints that some major event has transpired, but the first
person narrator has no vantage from which to determine what went wrong. Amsterdam’s
novel recognizes that knowledgeable exposition has become a tired trope of the
post-apocalyptic novel. Thus, through its formal innovation, Things We Didn’t See Coming differentiates
itself from the popular strain of the post-apocalyptic novel, while thinking
critically about what it can and cannot plausibly represent.

The
narrative form of the post-apocalyptic novel, how the story is told, lends it generic coherence despite this
contest over what it can (or should) do. The work of British literary critic
Frank Kermode on the apocalyptic provides a rich place to begin a formal
understanding of the post-apocalyptic novel.
In The Sense of an Ending,
Kermode suggests apocalyptic concerns allow individuals and societies
to locate themselves in space and time—we know where we are because we can see
that we are headed for an ending. Post-apocalyptic novels undertake an
inversion of Kermode’s apocalyptic narrative, beginning from the apocalyptic
end and working towards resolution in a new origin.

In the post-apocalyptic
novel the origin of historical time within the story is identical with the end
of the historical time of the reader. Put differently, post-apocalyptic novels
develop claims about the present as they work through an interpretation of
their historical conditions.Thus, we could say that the post-apocalyptic novel attempts to look
beyond the telos, beyond the ending,
of the apocalypse by distancing the confines of the present through an
estranging, apocalyptic event. Their formal inversion generates a newly cleared
space in which to imagine how social ways of being might change. I call this
device cognitive reduction—the elements of life under late capital are stripped
away, inviting imaginary scenarios to unfold in their place. Despite all of their setbacks, these
novels still promise to engage in thinking beyond the apocalyptic imaginary
outlined by Kermode, and that, to me, makes them worthy of our time and
attention.

Before
I proceed too much further, I should answer two questions: why talk about the novel
and why the U.S. post-apocalyptic novel in particular? I am a literary critic
by training, and an explanation for why I took up the post-apocalyptic novel as the centerpiece of my study
may not be needed in this company. However natural this decision seems, there
was choice involved. I found that the novel allowed for me to avoid the
sensational images of post-apocalyptic film (I have somewhat of an axe to grind
about the Emmerich perspective so widely used in his and other apocalyptic
films). Further, the novel has a rich history in grappling with historical
change, which can be seen in the assessment of Sir Walter Scott’s historical
novel by Georg Lukács and the description of “setting” in U.S. literary history
by Phillip Fischer in Hard Facts. The
post-apocalyptic novel offered the occasion for me to ask questions about
history, form, and politics (which just so happen to be three of my favourite
things).

The
United States acts as a geographic boundary for my dissertation for both
practical and methodological reasons. As for the practicality of it, I had to
limit the number of texts I would address in the dissertation: even a focus on
the post-World War II United States meant leaving many novels out of the
dissertation. The methodological reasoning was that United States has been
going through a major historical transition in the late 20th and
early 21st century. It has been moving from a phase of historical
dominance as an economic and political superpower to a phase of uncertainty.
Three particular moments of this change interest me most: first, the moment of
U.S. dominance just after the War at the zenith of what has been generally
called the American Century; second, the tightening grip of neoliberal
dominance in the mid-1980s; and, third, the moment of free fall between the
U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the on-going global financial crisis of
2007-2008. The coincidence of U.S. decline and a veritable rash of
post-apocalyptic novels struck me as the ripest relationship to consider in my
dissertation.

When
I began to plot out the dissertation, I was intrigued by the way these novels
seems to be operating, simultaneously, with uncanny precision in their
estimations of the scope of our current crises and with a wildly inaccurate
sense of what to do in the face of these various cataclysms. I began to trace
this seeming paradox of acuity to their role as national allegories. U.S.
post-apocalyptic novels, in particular, struggle with how historical change
takes place. They seem to want to come to terms with how to maintain the way of
things in the face of knowledge that this might not be the most equitable,
ethical, or environmental way of life. Their main theory of history seems to be
that of rupture—that only the apocalyptic event could restore order, enabling a
return, or just a turn, to a mode of social organization that will restore the
promise of what the U.S. could be. The problem for a critic reading these
novels is that this is a corpus composed of exceptions. The way they represent
the apocalyptic break and what they will suggest should follow in its wake
varies wildly from one novel to the next, which makes the post-apocalyptic
novel as form into a site of contest. The inversion of Kermode’s apocalyptic
narrative turns the post-apocalyptic novel into a veritable sandbox for
storytelling.

Along
with those first two coordinates of the more popular or literary variants,
these novels also struggle politically over what is to come. For instance, on
the one hand, James, Wesley Rawles’s Novels
of the Coming Collapse take a libertarian position, placing the individual
and that individual’s allegiance to a cadre of trusted militia-survivalist
patriots at the core of its post-apocalyptic enterprise. The United States have
collapsed and anyone from on the road, whether they are cannibals carrying
copies of Mao’s little red book, I kid you not, or folks claiming to be from
the U.S. government, they are not to be trusted. Rawles’s novels make a
political bid through their encyclopedic form, which is codified in their
extensive glossaries: these will be novels people learn from and look to in the
event of actual crisis. On the other hand, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore (1984)—the first novel in
a trilogy that imagines three different versions of Orange County, California—brings
a realist approach to the post-apocalyptic novel. The novel meditates on what
life might look like in the wake of a targeted apocalypse: the fictive conceit
of The Wild Shore is that a world
government banishes the United States to technological backwardness and
political obscurity through a nuclear strike. The politics of Robinson’s novel
are equally contained in the form: the novel is a kind of microcosm of the Three Californias trilogy precisely
because it presents multiple social ontologies in conflict without judiciously
selecting one as dominant or preferable. Robinson, rather than fantasizing
about how history could consecrate his politics, depicts a rich, plausible
post-apocalyptic world. As an aside, I have included my mapping of this novel
with the Jamesonian adaptation of A.J. Greimas’s semiotic square. I would be
happy to offer further explanation of this device after my talk.

In order to get to the bottom of the adaptability of the U.S.
post-apocalyptic novel to different political ends, I chose to understand it as
a mode or sub-genre of science fiction, because of the latter’s much lauded
capacity to think historically, to grapple with difficult questions, and to
encourage its readers to think critically. I suspect that we can adopt the
way Fredric Jameson describes science fiction to the post-apocalyptic novel, as
well:

Gerry Canavan and Priscilla Wald give life to Jameson’s theoretical
formation in their “Preface” to a special issue of American Literature on
science fiction:

“In a world whose
basic coordinates are under constant flux from eruptions of ecological crisis
to the emergence of genomic science, from the global realignments of religious
fundamentalism to the changing parameters of liberation theology, from the
ongoing unfoldings of antiracist activisms worldwide to the struggle for LGBTQ
rights, the estrangements of SF in all its forms, flavors, and subgenres become
for us a funhouse mirror on the present, a faded map of the future, a barely
glimpsed vision of alterity, and the prepped and ready launchpad for theory
today” (Canavan and Wald 2011, 247).

Thus, the contested politics of the
post-apocalyptic novel could be read as a contest over the future of the state
and the social in the wake of the political uncertainty generated by U.S.
economic decline and military action on the world stage. Because the post-apocalyptic novel’s
imagined futures are contested, they invite an engagement with literary form,
history, and politics that has implications for understand the relationship
between U.S. hegemony, global capital, and the possibility of a more equitable
future.

The
political stakes of my research are that we can and should know the world,
especially in the face of the relentless accumulation of capitalist production
and its devastating social and environmental effects. My dissertation does not
offer a grand scale mapping of literary endeavours and elements, nor does it
offer a molecular assessment of each novel’s humming particularity; rather, it
immanently studies the U.S. post-apocalyptic novel against the historical
conditions of U.S. declining hegemony. In this way, my project takes its cue
from American Studies, which invites a number of methodologies and approaches
under one roof in order to see where the tensions lie and, crucially, where
they might lead. Indeed, as I develop this study for publication, the production
of U.S. post-apocalyptic novels continues unabated as does their political
contest. In light of recent developments and the insight they offer, I find
myself returning to a symptom only briefly mentioned in this talk: the talk of
fuel in California and The Dog Stars. How are the
post-apocalyptic novel and its settings sustained by the ideology of energy? Do
post-apocalyptic novels offer a vantage from which to assess what critics have
come to call petroculture? Does the contested politics of the post-apocalyptic
novel read differently, with more urgency perhaps, when considered in light of
our current anthropogenic climate crisis? These questions are meant to
tantalize. Please do feel free to stay for the discussion of my thesis and,
whether you stay or other have places to be, thank you for coming.